Battlefront 3: DICE Won't "Just Ape What We've Seen In The Past"

EA's Frank Gibeau has iscussed the dream partnership of DICE with theStar Wars: BattlefrontIP, why the studio is the perfect choice to create a new instalment in the franchise, and how DICE will be shaking things up to ensure Battlefront is its own game, not just Battlefield in a galaxy far, far away.

“Battlefront is a vehicle experience, it’s a character experience," he told IGN. "DICE has proven, in how they develop Battlefield, as far as being able to do air, land, sea combat, all the way up to F-18s fighting.

“They’ve been able to demonstrate through the Frostbite tech and through their design capabilities and talent that they can create these huge, epic set-piece wars. That’s kind of the dream of Battlefront. Hoth, the battle of Hoth. You’ve got space, you’ve got the surface, you’ve got infantry, you’ve got AT-ATs. That’s the table stakes that they come in with. They know how to do that. They’re really good at it.”

“But [DICE isn't] just going to ape what we’ve seen in the past. They’re going to bring their own sensibilities and design ideas. We want to innovate. We want to try new things. From our perspective, it’s capturing that epic, Star Wars, all-out huge scale. That’s what we’ll go after.”

Speaking more broadly about Star Wars in general, Gibeau said that EA were in it for the long haul, citing the Batman: Arkham games as an example EA is hoping to follow.

“We signed a long-term deal so that we could really invest. This isn’t just a one-off,” Gibeau said. “We want to create experiences that operate in the Star Wars universe, not just mimicking the movies. It’ll be complementing the movies, the way that the Batman games have done. It’s in the world of DC’s comics, the world of Batman, but it’s not a literal playback of the film. That’s our first assumption. The second assumption is that we think we can tell Star Wars stories in multiple genres. We’re going to look at multiple genres in multiple ways -- to tell stories from a character point of view, from an epic all-out vehicle war point of view. It’s a very versatile place to go. It’s a very versatile place to design games. We’re going to do it over the long term. You’re going to see lots of different experiences from us.”